Seeing the invisible: from imagined to virtual urban landscapes

Urban ecosystems consist of infrastructure features working together to provide services for inhabitants. Infrastructure functions akin to an ecosystem, having dynamic relationships and interdependencies. However, with age, urban infrastructure can deteriorate and stop functioning. Additional pressures on infrastructure include urbanizing populations and a changing climate that exposes vulnerabilities. To manage the urban infrastructure ecosystem in a modernizing world, urban planners need to integrate a coordinated management plan for these co-located and dependent infrastructure features. To implement such a management practice, an improved method for communicating how these infrastructure features interact is needed. This study aims to define urban infrastructure as a system, identify the systematic barriers preventing implementation of a more coordinated management model, and develop a virtual reality tool to provide visualization of the spatial system dynamics of urban infrastructure. Data was collected from a stakeholder workshop that highlighted a lack of appreciation for the system dynamics of urban infrastructure. An urban ecology VR model was created to highlight the interconnectedness of infrastructure features. VR proved to be useful for communicating spatial information to urban stakeholders about the complexities of infrastructure ecology and the interactions between infrastructure features.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2019.102559Published versio

An Automated Supine Pressor Test: Implications for the Diagnosis of Preeclampsia

Preeclampsia, which involves excess protein in the urine as well as hypertension in pregnancy, affects up to 5-8% of pregnancies and 50-75,000 women die from preeclampsia-related complications every year [1]. This is a dangerous obstacle that can affect both the mother and fetus, often leading to premature birth. For those in low-resource settings, more than 250,000 neonatal preterm births are a result of preeclampsia because these mothers lack the necessary access to healthcare and the opportunity to seek out medical expertise. In this study, we are automating a detection tool for preeclampsia, referred to as the supine pressor test (SPT), to allow clinicians and expecting mothers to track the risk for preeclampsia longitudinally throughout pregnancy

Testing a global city hypothesis : an assessment of polarization across US cities

Social polarization is perhaps most evident within the world's large cities where we can easily observe stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. A world city theoretical perspective has emerged that associates large cities importance in a global network of cities to the degree of internal polarization within these cities. The research reported here locates 57 large US cities within this world city hierarchy and then empirically examines the hypothesized positive association between global centrality and social polarization using a multivariate, cross-city analysis. The findings are mixed, with some evidence that global centrality increases income polarization, but only in the context of higher levels of immigration. There is no evidence that a city's centrality affects occupational polarization. We conclude by suggesting implications for the world city literature and future research

Supervised Typing of Big Graphs using Semantic Embeddings

We propose a supervised algorithm for generating type embeddings in the same semantic vector space as a given set of entity embeddings. The algorithm is agnostic to the derivation of the underlying entity embeddings. It does not require any manual feature engineering, generalizes well to hundreds of types and achieves near-linear scaling on Big Graphs containing many millions of triples and instances by virtue of an incremental execution. We demonstrate the utility of the embeddings on a type recommendation task, outperforming a non-parametric feature-agnostic baseline while achieving 15x speedup and near-constant memory usage on a full partition of DBpedia. Using state-of-the-art visualization, we illustrate the agreement of our extensionally derived DBpedia type embeddings with the manually curated domain ontology. Finally, we use the embeddings to probabilistically cluster about 4 million DBpedia instances into 415 types in the DBpedia ontology.Comment: 6 pages, to be published in Semantic Big Data Workshop at ACM, SIGMOD 2017; extended version in preparation for Open Journal of Semantic Web (OJSW

Challenges to Transferring Western Field Research Materials and Methods to a Developing World Context

Much of the research currently undertaken in the area of intelligent tutoring systems hails from Western countries. To counteract any bias that this situation produces, to gain greater representation from the rest of the world, and to produce systems and publications that take cultural factors into account, experts recognize the need for more intercultural evaluations and collaborations. For these collaborations to be successful, though, methods and materials require modification. Field work methodologies used in developed countries have to be nuanced when transferred to developing world contexts. In specific, the paper describes five challenges that researchers must address in the transfer process: technology adoption, school support, infrastructure, student culture, and force majeure

Pharmacological activation of FOXO3 suppresses triple-negative breast cancer in vitro and in vivo

Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) is the most lethal form of breast cancer. Lacking effective therapeutic options hinders treatment of TNBC. Here, we show that bepridil (BPD) and trifluoperazine (TFP), which are FDA-approved drugs for treatment of schizophrenia and angina respectively, inhibit Akt-pS473 phosphorylation and promote FOXO3 nuclear localization and activation in TNBC cells. BPD and TFP inhibit survival and proliferation in TNBC cells and suppress the growth of TNBC tumors, whereas silencing FOXO3 reduces the BPD- and TFP-mediated suppression of survival in TNBC cells. While BPD and TFP decrease the expression of oncogenic c-Myc, KLF5, and dopamine receptor DRD2 in TNBC cells, silencing FOXO3 diminishes BPD- and TFP-mediated repression of the expression of these proteins in TNBC cells. Since c-Myc, KLF5, and DRD2 have been suggested to increase cancer stem cell-like populations in various tumors, reducing these proteins in response to BPD and TFP suggests a novel FOXO3-dependent mechanism underlying BPD- and TFP-induced apoptosis in TNBC cells

Oral Cancer Screening Habits Performed by Registered Dental Hygienists

The purpose of this study was to assess if registered dental hygienists perform thorough and complete extraoral and intraoral assessments for cancer detection through the use of palpation techniques, visualization and adjunctive screening devices. Our goal was to assess if these exams are being performed routinely and thoroughly, and if not, what possible barriers to regular exams may exist. This study will determine if registered dental hygienists perform thorough and complete extra oral and intra oral assessments for cancer detection. If there is a lack of performance of extra oral and intra oral assessments, it is essential to determine the barriers that are preventing the hygienist from performing them. This information will be generalizable to all RDH’s

CHARACTERIZATION OF EXTREMELY LOW-LEVEL OPTICAL ABSORPTION AND SCATTERING IN CRYSTALLINE MATERIALS FOR HIGH-ENERGY LASERS APPLICATIONS

Window materials used in the current generation of high-energy laser (HEL) systems cannot be used for next-generation systems since these aim to operate at or near the megawatt level under CW operation. Related intensities will lead to beam distortion and possibly damage of current optical materials. These materials include polycrystalline spinel and single-crystal sapphire – both have undesirable optical absorption and scattering near the 1 μm wavelength that limit their performance in future HEL applications. However, phenomena associated with optical absorption and scattering have not been comprehensively studied for the crystalline materials of interest and, as a result, the physical mechanisms underlying both optical losses in these materials are not well understood. The overall goal for this research is to obtain a comprehensive understanding of low-level absorption and scattering in sapphire and spinel at and near the 1 μm wavelength region using the commercially available samples. In this work, ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy and photothermal common-path interferometry are used to measure bulk and surface absorption losses in different samples in the UV-visible-near-infrared wavelength regions. The absorption coefficient values obtained are in the range of 10-5 to 100 cm-1 and increase as the wavelength decreases. In addition, scattering measurements on samples with different surface polishing conditions are made at 405, 532, 633, 1064, and 1550 nm using an instrument developed to assess the bidirectional scatterance probability distribution function. The total integrated scatterance is in the range of 10-5 to 10-1 and increases for all samples as the wavelength decreases. Different absorption and scattering models are applied to interpret the measured data. Materials characterization techniques including positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy, laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy, iii secondary ion mass spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, and optical and electron microscopies are utilized to characterize bulk and surface defects in different samples. Overall, the measurement results indicate that both weak absorption and scattering losses are strongly related to defect structures such as lattice disorder and impurities that were introduced during crystal growth or post-growth processing. Understanding these defects and their contributions to optical loss can lead to improved manufacturing and processing methods